We know little about the mechanisms through which leader–follower dynamics during dyadic play shape infants’ language acquisition. We hypothesized that infants’ decisions to visually explore a specific object signal focal increases in endogenous attention, and that when caregivers respond to these proactive behaviors by naming the object it boosts infants’ word learning. To examine this, we invited caregivers and their 14-mo-old infants to play with novel objects, before testing infants’ retention of the novel object-label mappings. Meanwhile, their electroencephalograms were recorded. Results showed that infants’ proactive looks toward an object during play associated with greater neural signatures of endogenous attention. Furthermore, when caregivers named objects during these episodes, infants showed greater word learning, but only when caregivers also joined their focus of attention. Our findings support the idea that infants’ proactive visual explorations guide their acquisition of a lexicon.

中文翻译：

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早期社交互动期间的领导者-追随者动态对婴儿单词学习很重要


我们对二元游戏中领导者-追随者动态塑造婴儿语言习得的机制知之甚少。我们假设，婴儿决定视觉探索特定物体会导致内源性注意力集中增加，并且当护理人员通过命名物体来响应这些主动行为时，会促进婴儿的单词学习。为了检验这一点，我们邀请看护者和他们 14 个月大的婴儿玩新奇的物体，然后测试婴儿对新奇的物体-标签映射的保留情况。与此同时，他们的脑电图被记录下来。结果表明，婴儿在玩耍时主动注视某个物体与内源性注意力的更大神经特征相关。此外，当护理人员在这些事件中命名物体时，婴儿表现出更好的单词学习能力，但前提是护理人员也加入了他们的注意力焦点。我们的研究结果支持这样的观点：婴儿主动的视觉探索引导他们获取词汇。